Person/Paul Ford/Article/26/02/The A.I. Disruption Is Actually Here, and It’s Not Terrible
- Author: Person/Paul Ford
- Source: New York Times
- Journal link: 2026/02/20
Highlights
- "What might the future look like if 100 million, or a billion, people can make any software they desire? ... Could this be a moment of unparalleled growth and opportunity as people gain access to tech industry power for themselves?"
- "According to the market, the answer is no. Recently, software stocks — Monday.com, Salesforce, Adobe and many others — plummeted all at once."
- "I can do hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of work for fun ... over weekends and evenings, for the price of the Claude $200-a-month plan."
- "Is the software I’m making for myself on my phone as good as handcrafted, bespoke code? No. But it’s immediate and cheap ... it would meet every deadline."
- "A good technology manager assumes that a product will never ship for launch ... and then the manager works back from that."
- "In software, dramatic change is to be avoided at all costs. The risk is just too high."
- "The web wasn’t ‘real’ software until it was ... Big, serious companies weren’t going to migrate to the cloud, and then one day they did."
- "People trumpet the Jevons paradox ... would it surprise you to find out tomorrow that large technology consulting firms had just laid off 10,000 people?"
- "The market keeps convulsing, and I wish we could hit the brakes. But we live in a brakeless era."
- "No matter where you work, my hunch is this is coming for you."
Note
- Focused this page on the Readwise highlights and their implications for software labor, delivery speed, and risk management.